Just ate a #Voynich cake last week!

What a magnificent day! I gave a lecture about SMU manuscripts, then Bonnie Wheeler took me & a few other colleagues to visit a private collection in Dallas where we saw literally MILLIONS OF DOLLARS of UNBELIEVABLY GORGEOUS manuscripts, then had a dinner party with Voynich cake! My heart is full!

Off to Dallas tomorrow for a manuscript road trip! Going to @dallaslibrary.bsky.social to see their Ege leaves, then SMU's Bridwell Library. What will I find? Watch this space!

May their memories be a blessing. ז״ל

This is literally my all-time favorite miniature! Look at those crazy eyes!

Escapist fun + a pretty cool (and ultimately fairly plausible) #Voynich origin story from an author who has done her homework = The Burning Library by @gillymacmillan.bsky.social. Highly recommend!

grrrr

Apparently basketball knowledge is not a factor in winning one's family's March Madness pool, because I just won. Congrats, @uofmichigan.bsky.social, and thanks for the W!

❤️

Terrific piece, David!

yes, yes it does

There's actually a whole very long explanation about why it isn't at the Vatican, it certainly could have ended up there if things had gone differently. If you go to Voynich.nu and read about the history of the manuscript, you'll learn all about the centuries it spent with the Jesuits in Rome

I have absolutely no doubt that it is an authentic 15th-century object. As for whether it actually has meaning or not, I will defer to @chirila.bsky.social, but I think it likely. Here's a list of responsible and reliable #Voynich resources: drive.google.com/file/d/186uT...

I get Voynich solutions literally EVERY DAY now. It's chaos!

Who knew that Dark-Age-Splaining was a thing?

As far as I know, there's no evidence that Ege inherited the term. Duschnes didn't offer leaves of these outside portfolios, and they weren't sold in Lima either. We don't know when it was broken, so there's no identified pre-breaking description.

I know, right?!

Remember Space Sticks?

p.s. leaves of these two manuscripts can be found in the Ege portfolio titled "Fifteen Original Oriental Leaves" (speaking of colonial praxis...). The Armenian MS also shows up in Ege's "Orig. Leaves from Famous Bibles" sets. If you hold one of these portfolios, you've got examples of these leaves!

And if you think your collection has Ege leaves, you can use my online Ege Field Guide to identify them! Let me know if you find any. Happy hunting! drive.google.com/drive/folder...

Otto F. Ege – Manuscript Road Trip Posts about Otto F. Ege written by Lisa Fagin Davis

For more on Otto Ege, see these blogposts: manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/category/ott...

There's a third lesson I always emphasize in my Library Science classroom: description is not neutral. It is an act that demands respect for & understanding of the people and cultures that created the book. It is the responsibility of the cataloguer/scholar to do right by their material.

The lesson here is 1) don't cut up manuscripts because you will lose, among other things, important provenance info like colophons, and 2) don't just blindly trust inherited metadata.

Ege's miscataloguing of these leaves is a double insult: 1st, he destroyed the manuscripts, and 2nd, he sent their leaves out into the world with bad data attached to them. There is also a colonial aspect, as he marketed these and other non-Latin-alphabet leaves as "oriental" & "exotic" specimens.

In this case, the Chortlemuffin-ing isn't quite as egregious since many cataloguers have corrected the date. Even so, if you search for "Armenian" and "1121" in Worldcat.org, guess what you find? Lots of leaves from this manuscript.

2) Why is the date of "1121 A.D." doubted by experts? Because it's another misreading. The colophon page was cited in an old catalogue, and while it does read "1121", that's "1121" IN THE ARMENIAN CALENDAR. Which converts to 1671 C.E.

1) HOW DID HE KNOW ABOUT THE COLOPHON? Because the manuscript used to be complete. When he cut it up, the colophon disappeared. DON'T CUT UP MANUSCRIPTS just sayin'

Now, about that Armenian lectionary (Ege Handlist 56). In his description of the leaves, he writes "The paper and alphabet used indicate a XVth century writing though the colophon gave an earlier date, namely 1121 A.D., which is doubted by experts." Indeed it is, but not for the reason Ege thought!

Here's where our friend Prof. Chortlemuffin enters the chat. If you do a Google search for the word "Maghireli," ALL of the results are leaves from this very manuscript. Ege's bad data has been inherited by well-meaning cataloguers worldwide.

Consider this Qur'an, for example (Ege Handlist 62). If you've studied Arabic paleography, you'll recognize this script as Maghrebi (the bowls!), localizable to North Africa. But look closely at Ege's description. He calls this script "Maghireli," a meaningless misreading.